Screenwriters don’t come much more versatile, industrious or enduring than Alvin Sargent, who has died aged 92. His career incorporated everything from prestigious literary adaptations to wham-bam superhero fantasies. He won Oscars for his screenplays for Julia (1977), concerning the lifelong friendship between Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) and an anti-fascist activist played by Vanessa Redgrave, and Ordinary People (1980), Robert Redford’s directorial debut about the slow thawing of a wealthy but repressed Chicago family as it wrestles with grief. Sargent was also nominated for Paper Moon (1973), Peter Bogdanovich’s film about a con-man on the road with a girl who may or may not be his child; the crackling, zinger-strewn script was delivered with relish by the father-and-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal.
The best of the Spider-Man series, Spider-Man 2 (2004), was written by Sargent – “Now this is what a superhero movie should be,” said the critic Roger Ebert. Sargent also did uncredited work on the 2002 original, and co-wrote the third part (in 2007). He was one of three writers on the reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), with Andrew Garfield taking over the Lycra bodysuit from Tobey Maguire. All the movies were produced by Laura Ziskin, Sargent’s partner since 1987; the pair married in 2010.
His speciality, however, was the perspicacious adaptation, with an x-ray analysis of human fallibility. Julia, Ordinary People and Paper Moon were all adapted from other sources, as were equally notable scripts such as Straight Time (1978), with Dustin Hoffman as an ex-con slipping back into a life of crime, and White Palace (1990), starring James Spader as a yuppie whose relationship with an older waitress (Susan Sarandon) bristles with class tensions.
The producer and writer JJ Abrams cited Ordinary People as his defining inspiration when starting out: “I wanted to try to fill pages with the same kind of spirit and thought and emotion that that script did.” Another screenwriter, Larry Gross, said: “Alvin Sargent was almost universally regarded by writers, producers, agents, everybody in Hollywood as the gold standard for serious, creative screenwriting.”
Born in Philadelphia, Alvin was the son of Isaac Supowitz, who sold grain, and Esther (nee Kadansky), who raised him and his older brother, Herbert, later to become a successful television writer and producer. In 1941, Isaac killed himself.
The boys were educated at Upper Darby high school and, towards the end of the war, Alvin enrolled in the US navy once he discovered that it would bestow on him automatic graduation status, no matter how poor his grades had been. “It wasn’t about heroism,” he said. During his time there, he became an accomplished typist. “My passion was typing, not writing. I used to practise typing and then I started writing dialogue – ‘people talking to each other’ is what I called it.”
He left the navy after a few years and went to California, where his mother was living, and worked for a clothing company delivering suits to such people as Cecil B DeMille and Melvyn Douglas. Interested in acting, he joined the Circle theatre group in Los Angeles, where he was once directed by Charlie Chaplin, then got a small part in From Here to Eternity (1953), directed by Fred Zinnemann, who would make Julia 24 years later.
During this time, he was also selling advertisements for the Hollywood trade paper Variety, a job he stuck with for 10 years, until he started making a living in the early 1960s from TV scriptwriting on the hospital drama Ben Casey and the crime series Naked City. He switched from Supowitz to Sargent around this time: “It’s an easier name to sell in Hollywood,” he said.
The jaunty caper Gambit (1966), in which a cat burglar (Michael Caine) teams up with a showgirl (Shirley MacLaine), gave him his first screenwriting credit. It was followed by the western The Stalking Moon (1968) and a string of emotionally searching dramas. The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), released in the UK as Pookie, starred Liza Minnelli as an unpredictable teenager beginning a love affair, and kicked off Sargent’s collaboration with the director Alan J Pakula, for whom he also wrote Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973). I Walk the Line (1970) gave Gregory Peck one of his most demanding roles, as a married sheriff beginning an affair with a much younger woman.
With Paul Newman directing, Sargent adapted Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer prizewinning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), starring Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, and one of their daughters, Nell Potts. He did uncredited work on the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and turned Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Heaven Has No Favourites into Bobby Deerfield (1977), with Al Pacino as a racing driver falling for a terminally ill woman (Marthe Keller).
He wrote again for Streisand on Nuts (1987), in which she plays a prostitute on trial for murder, and shared a story credit with Ziskin on the frantic comedy What About Bob? (1991), with Bill Murray as a needy patient who follows his therapist (Richard Dreyfuss) on holiday.
Among the less welcome changes he noticed during his years in the business was the penchant for expensive rewrites. “I saw a budget paper on a movie,” he said in 2009, “and it had what the producer gets, what the director gets, what the writer gets, what the rewriter will get – it’s already on the budget sheet while the movie is being developed. That’s a little frightening.”
The Amazing Spider-Man was Sargent’s last script to be filmed. He mourned in recent years the failure to sell his screenplay Madly in Love, which he wrote in the late 1980s and which used his own terrifying experience at the hands of an armed intruder, as the inspiration for a romp about a man overcoming his phobias.
Ziskin died from cancer in 2011. Sargent is survived by Amanda and Jennifer, his daughters from his marriage to Joan Creears (an actor known as Joan Camden), which ended in 1975; and by a stepdaughter, Julia Barry, from Ziskin’s marriage to the screenwriter Julian Barry.
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